Hello lovelies! Sorry for being MIA for so long! I was captivated by another plot line, and have spent my time elsewhere. And so here is a small update, just to keep things moving a little. I promise for a longer, more exciting chapter very soon!

Thanks!

He was alive, but some days he wondered if it had been better for him to be dead. It is better to see a life end, than to become a despicable piece of outcast rubbish—despised in even this wasteland of sand and filth.

Eve had not ran when he had said that, when those words had slipped through the gates of his mind and across his tongue. It was knowledge that he had locked away from himself, finding it better to consider him dead than the men that he stood now. And he had not thought of the brother for hundreds of days. But being around this woman flushed him out—brought up everything he had worked so hard on keeping down.

The demons. They all took flight in the recesses of his mind.

She stood before him, claw-like hands grasping at the front of his linen shirt. It was instinct for him; to bare himself rigid, leaned back on his heels and his chin upward. Better to stand as a wall, then a creature of comfort.

"You shouldn't have told me that," she had breathed and departed with not another word. Maybe she had been too afraid to inquire of more information—maybe he had been to apprehensive to answer them.

But he had found himself in the garages instantly, palm brushing over the top of his pathetic V8. Pulled from the outside of the canyon, where it had been crushed between the two rigs. He had pulled a crisp War Boy body from it and spent days tinkering before it finally revved to life. It was shambles, but it ran.

And he was tired of talking to the corpse.

There were good mechanics in Gastown, and he traded his boots for the repairs. They had told him just a day to hammer out the cavernous concaves of the steel ulterior. He was welcome to wait in the garage—he wondered if they desired the protection, weakened without water.

The People Eater would never return.

And then he had seen them, day after day, walking circles in a courtyard. The women. One looked all too familiar. And it only took him three days before he knew it to be her.

He was not the most noble of men, and considered fleeing upon realizing it was her—the girl from his childhood. And as he was preparing to do so, late one evening, fate decided otherwise, and he was cornered.

And now, as he stood over his Interceptor—still hardly the breathing piece of steel it once was—he does not regret that it lead him back to the Citadel, where he could find peace in seeing the Wives and Furiosa still striving. To see the nation flourishing in their care. Yet seeing Eve…

Like his brother, it would have been better for her to be dead.

He kept to himself for two days, wandering the bowels of the Citadel, and she did not disrupt him. Her world did not pause when he arrived—she would not devote her precious time to him any longer. It all simply reinforced her previous knowledge; that fleshly desires were unneeded distractions.

Furiosa needed no one.

They needed supplies from Bartertown, and she could wait little longer. Yet she withheld her questions until he came to her—which he finally did on the third day, while she sat on the hood of a War Rig. It had been put to rest well before the redemption that was Fury Road, and sat in the dark, eaten by rust and rot.

"It could run again," he said, stepping into the single, cavernous room that held the Rig.

"It needs more time than Capable can spare," she turned, swinging her legs over the edge of the hood to climb down.

Max stepped forward, hands hooking onto her hips to assist her. Yet her hip jolted to the side, rejecting his touch, and he took a step back. Her feet landed against the stone flooring, and she swiped her palms clean against her thighs.

"You could work on it."

She scoffed, turned and brushed past him.

"I don't have time to fix things that are damaged beyond repair."

And she was gone.

"When do you ride out?" Toast asked, sitting at the mouth of the Citadel mountain. The moon shone brightly, casting a silver stream of light over her lovely, dark skin.

Furiosa stood beside her, arms crossed over her chest. She stared down at her nation. Small fires were lit across the earth beneath them.

"Two days."

Toast looked up at her. "And what of Max?"

Furiosa said nothing.

"The lovely, broken Road Warrior," Toast breathed, looking back down at the people; quiet, peaceful. "He will either be your redemption, or your undoing, Furiosa."

Her head snapped down to look at Toast.

Toast sighed heavily. "And sometimes… we all need someone to unwind the tight coils within us," she reached out and grabbed Furiosa's steel hand. "Sometimes we need to be… undone."

Thank you, lovelies!